Since you can’t pay with cash online, I would venture to say that most online buyers use a credit card to pay for their purchases. If you are the online seller, you pay up to 6% or more to accept credit cards and you take a risk due to the rampant fraud on card not present transactions. Lets us assume you are an online business where budgets are tight and cannot put in place the sophisticated fraud-detection software required in your checkout process to limit or stop fraud. If this sounds like your shop then keep reading, this is for you.

The customer is always right.

If a credit card number gets cloned or stolen and you as a shopper gets charged for a shopping spree you call your bank/credit card company and reject all the charges — because it was not you making them. For the most part, the credit card companies will side with the customer and either put a hold on the transaction and even reverse the charges for the cardholder while the issue gets resolved with the vendor.

Customer protection equals loyalty.

Usually, the bank and credit card company do a very good job of fulfilling their promise to the cardholders, they will reverse all the charges and eventually get all your money back. This makes a lot of sense if you are the credit card holder, after all, you are paying for the card and all the benefits it brings with it – the credit card companies and the banks want you to keep your card and happily pay the fees every year/month. It is in their best interest to have a loyal customer.

If you are a merchant that accepts credit cards, most often you need a credit card processor. In short, they take the cash from your customer and deposit it into your bank account minus a few fees. That works well most of the time, until a cloned credit card transaction comes across, in which case the credit card processor will take the cash out of your bank account and “process a reversal of the transaction” — and yes they are allowed to do that for up to a year after the transaction was executed… read the fine print in your merchant processing contract. Not cool if you are the seller right?

What are the alternatives?

An alternative you might want to consider is accepting cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin or ethereum just to name a few. Payments in cryptocurrencies like bitcoin (BTC) or ethereum (ETH) are better suited for online shipping because they are irreversible. Once the transaction has been confirmed by the network, you got your payment and there are no reversals. The blockchain is immutable, no one can go back into the blockchain take your money.

The bad news is that crypto wallets (where you keep the keys to your bitcoins or ethereum) are not as prevalent or as widely accepted as credit cards are today. Just ask around how many people in a room have a credit card on their wallet vs how many have a crypto wallet (even though the vast majority are free and pretty easy to use as an app on your phone).

Who will drive the adoption of cryptocurrency?

Consumer have a solution in their pockets already, they have cash and credit cards. They are not the ones feeling the pain and neither are their banks or Visa, MasterCard or American Express, those guys are making millions of dollars on transaction fees. It is the online shops who have the problem, and it is them who need to start changing the habits of their consumers to prevent the millions of dollars lost to credit card fraud.

Cryptocurrencies are not hard, you already know how to use them.

If you know how to use Venmo, PayPal, Square, Snapchat, Facebook, WhatsApp, Tinder, Instagram or Twitter, you already know how to use a crypto wallet in your phone. It is as easy as to download a reputable wallet like MyCellium, Blockchain, Xapo, Ethereum or Jaxx. If you are a retailer, you might want to try Coinbase or a cryptocurrency enabled shopping cart.

The most important step is to get educated on this new technology, because it will save you lot of money in the long run, and that is something Visa, MasterCard or Visa cannot do today.